2.
LOCATION: Right thigh, 6” above knee (1985)
CAUSE: Hayknife driven deep while opening a 50lb sack of oats
DIAGNOSIS: Hole in favorite acid-washed jeans; shallowish wound that bleeds well on favorite acid-washed jeans
TREATMENT: Bactine and Band-Aid; stupid-looking iron-on patch for jeans because my mom won’t buy me another pair
FOLLOWUP: Jeans have to be turned into cutoffs when patch fails; yes, they are still called cutoffs in 1985.

3.
LOCATION: Shoulders (1985+)
CAUSE: Genetic defect
DIAGNOSIS: Back acne. Huge angry painful red pustules that I cannot resist breaking, resulting in angry red scars
TREATMENT: Tetracycline, which does not work because I forget to take it an hour before or two hours after I eat, and also increases sun sensitivity and I ride my horse an hour a day in an outdoor arena and I cannot bring myself to wear long sleeves in the heat
FOLLOWUP: Hate my dad for passing on his acne prone genes. Wear a t-shirt when in public pool to hide scars; most have faded 30 years later and most people stare at my boobs anyway

4.
LOCATION: Right knee (1990)
CAUSE: Tripped over friend Dave (or Daryl?)’s metal bedframe on first day of classes sophomore year of college
DIAGNOSIS: Staph infection (#1). Gross.
TREATMENT: Visit to campus clinic for antibiotic (penicillin allergy); panicked call from clinic nurse to not take the Keflex because it’s counter-indicated for penicillin allergy–there is a chance I could die of anaphylaxis; two weeks of sulfa drugs and no pool for lifeguard class and no drinking and itching like mad as it heals
FOLLOWUP: 4” scar persists 25 years later

5.
LOCATION: Heart (Paris) (1992)
CAUSE: Boy loves “someone else”
DIAGNOSIS: Broken. Duh.
TREATMENT: After considering stepping in front of a black Mercedes Benz cab speeding along the Boulevard St. Germain, instead consume large amounts of cheap French wine in company of one good guy friend who doesn’t judge or say things like “there are other fish in the sea” (like I will ever want to go fishing again anyway)
FOLLOWUP: Boy marries “someone else” (blonde, blue-eyed, calm) and lives a quiet life in Xenia, Ohio; sporadic trials of one-night stands do nothing and one long-term relationship collapses under the weight of the boy’s ghost though it’s also true that boyfriend wanted a cheerleader type instead of former philosophy major and current Master’s candidate working part-time in a Waldenbooks but that is another story

Some days I use the prompts, some days I share stuff I am (re)working on, and some days I sit down and bang something out. I tried it last year while teaching my creative writing course, and I enjoyed it. Having a goal gave me the ability to grant time for myself, for my own work. Like many professors, I am often loathe to take because it means that a host of other stuff from my “real” job gets pushed off. But for 30 days, I can do this for myself.

Today’s post is from a work I started after reading Fran Wilde’s blog post “A Map Year” .

Like Fran, I have always loved maps. One of my favorite memories of Paris is of a tiny shop I stumbled over in an alley in the Latin Quarter –marine maps, city maps, old maps, new maps. Maps on the wall, maps in drawers. I couldn’t afford any of them, but the smell of all that paper still lingers in my memory. Paris occupies a lot of space in my memory map.

My childhood was spent outside. I ran through brambles and tall grass, rode my pony with no saddle or bridle–just an “Indian” bridle made of a few twists of baling twine. If I fell off (or more likely, got scraped off on a low-hanging branch), I walked until I caught her, and I got back on.

“Unless something’s broken,” my mother said more than once, “You get back on.”

One bright summer afternoon when I was about 12, I was riding with my friend April Flagg, whose family ran Herefords on the farm behind ours. She had a little Arab cross, and I had my pony–Cocoa–and we were pelting hellbent for leather across the open pasture. My pony decided that she’d had enough, and started an arc towards the barn. I wasn’t done with our running, and I pulled on the left rein to pull her back behind April’s mare. She was stronger than I was, and had a hard mouth from years of being yanked on by yahoos, including me.

She kept her arc to the barn.

Since I didn’t understand force, or physics, and I was getting pissed, I yanked hard on the left rein.

Hard enough to flip us over.

(For those of you who’ve never ridden a horse: We have reins to control the head–if you control the head, the rest of the horse has to follow. This is why, if you are ever on a runaway horse, gently guide the horse into a circle, then make the circle tighter and tighter.

Please note that this tactic will not work if you are in a forest.)

When I regained consciousness, the sky was bright blue. The first thing I did was check to make sure I hadn’t landed in a cowpie. I still had my helmet on. Then I checked to see if I remembered who I was and where I lived: 512 West Highland Road. Yep. Me.

I got up and walked–towards the barn–where I saw my pony tied to the fence. I was in the process of untying her and putting my foot back in the stirrup when my mom barreled up the driveway in our big blue Chevy van. April must have run into the house to have her mom call mine. No idea how long I was unconscious.

“What are you doing?” she yelled out the window as she threw the van into park.

“You told me to get back on if I fell off and nothing was broken. I have to get back on.” And before she could get out of the van to stop me, I swung my right leg up and over, and turned the pony away from the barn.

She did manage to get through the gate in time to stop me from going further than a few feet away. The sun was really bright, and I could tell she was scared.

She took me to the ER and was told I had a concussion, and that I should not be allowed to sleep until it was my normal bedtime. I spent the rest of the day on the dark green Springsteel couch, drinking 7-Up and watching television, none the worse for wear.

There is more to this that will come, maybe later, when I have more time. I have been trying to figure out how to get back to being that fearless kid–the kid who got back on when she fell off.

(I fell off less often than you might expect, but my last horse had a hearty, twisty buck and I liked to ride without a saddle in the middle of winter in northern Ohio. Dumb? Probably.)

While sorting through a box of old photos just now–ran across one of my mom posing in a bright purple bathing suit next to a pool–Myrtle Beach vacation, when I was 9.

I nearly drowned in that pool (saved by a stranger when I got into deep water while my dad was asleep on the deck). The gasping kind of drowning where my head popped above the surface as I launched myself straight up. I could see my dad, fast asleep in the sun.

This did not put me off swimming. I learned how to swim the following summer and we had an above-ground pool that I practically lived in during high school.

What happened to that kid? Where did she go?

With Ziggy (Nitzinger 1978-2010) 1988 Summit County Fair Fourth place overall Versatility thanks to our second place finish in barrel racing. He took care of me.

Yesterday, I woke up feeling overwhelmed, sad for absolutely no reason, and just wanted to stay in bed and cry all day. I haven’t had an episode like this in quite a long time so it scared the absolute shit out of me. I texted a few very good friends who know me well and who would know exactly what I needed to hear, I took my medication, and slowly, throughout the day, things got better. I still felt exhausted. I still felt sad. I still felt anxious about being sad but today I’m better. Rationally, my brain knew this would be temporary, but physiologically, I was already in that head space, and there was nothing I could do to “snap” out of it.

My old therapist used to call this “getting on the bus.” She said to me, “Kelly, if you saw a bus being hijacked, would you choose…

These are my thoughts now
brittle like the bottom of a new ice cream cone
like iron heated once too often
like stands of October corn
like Grandma’s hip
like old paper
crumpled and scattered for the cat
to paw at under the refrigerator.